May 2017 Update

Happy May! :) In honor of International Worker’s Day, I’d like to take the opportunity to plug one of my favorite books of the last few years, Reinventing Organizations. Decentralized, self-organizing businesses really do exist, in industries from manufacturing to healthcare, and this book shows how it can be done. As an idealist who has found myself suddenly running a manufacturing business with a growing team of employees, I find this vision extremely inspiring and I hope that someday this business can have as big an impact of empowerment and liberation through the lives of the people working for it as it does through the products it sells.

Anyway, here are the updates:

New rice protein that doesn’t taste awful!

Back to next-day shipping, or close to it.

Free US shipping on orders over $100!

Bimonthly subscriptions now available.

The biggest good news is that we’ve been able to get a better placeholder rice protein that doesn’t have the awful burnt taste of the previous one. All the products made in the last month or so have been made with this new rice protein. Phew! :p Still no updates on availability from our preferred supplier, but the worst is over.

Part of the reason we didn’t announce this earlier is that we were also a bit backlogged over the past month as well. One of our manufacturing technicians, Justin, had to stop working due to (unrelated) health issues and production slowed as we filled in for him and looked for a replacement. Fortunately, he is recovering and we have hired Julia, who, along with Jamaica, is now cranking out batches at an impressive rate. So we’re happy to say that the shipping delays of the last several weeks have been resolved, and we’re back to shipping next-day, or close to it!

Now that we’re caught up with our backlog, I’m excited to finally introduce something I’ve wanted to do for a while: free shipping on larger orders. As we’ve honed our process and seen sales stabilize at a sustainable level, we are finally at a point where we can begin to pass cost-savings back to you, our customers. So, to start with, we are offering free shipping on orders and subscriptions over $100! :D This is only for US orders – unfortunately international shipping is still prohibitively expensive, though international expansion is part of our plan, as soon as we have the volume to make it work, logistically.

As part of this update, we’re adding the option to have your subscription delivered every two months, so that you can consolidate your subscription into a larger order to save on shipping. If you’d like to change your subscription, just tell us in an email and we’ll take care of it for you. ;) Or, you’re always welcome to cancel your existing subscription and set up a new one yourself.

Coming soon:

New, odor-free vitamin mix just arrived!

MCT oil powder for Keto Fuel coming in June.

New electrolyte mix for better nutrition and taste.

We just received our first shipment of our custom vitamin mix from our new supplier, reformulated to be free of the sulfurous odor of the original batch. It was the L-Selenomethionine, the active selenium compound that gives garlic and onions their characteristic odor, and to a lesser extent the particular brand of Choline L-Bitartrate, that caused the smell after all. We’re now using the odorless amino acid chelate Selenium Glycinate instead, and a more expensive but relatively odorless Choline L-Bitratrate in this version. You can expect to start receiving product with this new mix over the next few weeks.

More excitingly, we’ve just put in an order for a custom MCT oil powder made with Acacia Gum, which we are expecting to receive by the end of May. The plan is to add it to Keto Fuel, at a dosage equivalent to about half a tablespoon of MCT oil per meal, so you’ll no longer have to buy and add MCT oil yourself when using Keto Fuel! Even better, this reduces the dusty lightness of the Keto Fuel powder that is so annoying when trying to scoop and pour it. :p And crucially, we’ve been able to get the costs of this extra ingredient down enough that we won’t be raising the price of Keto Fuel at all – it will just be a better product, at the same price. So we’re really looking forward to rolling this out in June. :)

Also, we’ve just finished lining up the last suppliers for our electrolyte upgrade, and will be getting our hands on these new ingredients by the end of the month if all goes well. We’ve found that the electrolyte Potassium Citrate is responsible for the majority of the unpleasant flavors in our products, especially the potassium-heavy Keto Fuel, and we are cautiously optimistic about the opportunity we have here to significantly improve the taste with a few formula tweaks. So, we’ll keep you posted on that – and if you want to help out with taste-testing, definitely let us know. ;)

Last but not least, thanks for your help with our branding survey in February! We’ve been glad to hear that the qualities that we’ve been most proud of, in terms of our product and service, are the same qualities that you notice and appreciate. However, it’s also clear that neither “Schmilk” nor “Super Body Fuel” do a good job of expressing that brand identity. So we’re going back to the drawing board as far as articulating our brand and coming up with a name and visual identity that will really speak to what is unique about us. Stay tuned! ;)